By Shaun Sarvis | Huron Plainsman
This column began 50 years ago when Jeannette Lusk had the foresight to invest approximately two million dollars into an offset printing press that would deliver the printed word for decades to come.
If you aren’t familiar with Mrs. Lusk, she was a charter member of the South Dakota Arts Council, the president of the Art Center board that helped establish the South Dakota Art Museum, the 1990 Spirit of Dakota honoree, the daughter of Gov. Coe Crawford, and the publisher of the Huron Plainsman.
The same press she acquired in 1975 is now responsible for the printing of The Huron Plainsman, The Brookings Register, The Moody County Enterprise, and The Redfield Press.
This brings me to today, where I am addressing the printing quality of these publications which is best described as a “work in progress.” When we reopened the papers, we did so with a shortage of press operators, creating a problem that we are finally beginning to resolve.
Most people aren’t familiar with offset presses, but they have units used to print the image from a plate onto the paper in a single color. When printing the Plainsman, one of those units may print four black pages at a time that eventually become the pages you’re reading right now. If the pages have color on them, it gets a bit trickier as each unit can only have one color of ink, so it takes four units to make a set of full colored pages. These units are large and I often describe them as living things because they’re sensitive to the climate and they like to shift as they run, requiring little adjustments as they print tomorrow’s headlines.
This makes for a lot of legwork when you’re printing a 16-page paper and you have seven units running. Previous managing editor, Curt Nettinga, described it as a beast that required more art than skill to operate.
With the recent loss of another printing press in South Dakota, we’re proud to be one of the few presses printing a newspaper in-house and we are currently putting in the work, time, and money to keep that tradition alive.
Operating our own printing press means more jobs in our community, more local control in what we print, and more sustainability in our future.
All I’m asking for is some patience as we increase our staff and tame the beast.
— Shaun Sarvis is the regional publisher for The Huron Plainsman, The Brookings Register, The Moody County Enterprise and The Redfield Press.
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